By Ben Smith:
I can’t believe that the Mississippi alligator season came and went so fast. Tagging out on the first night is awesome, but it also left me with a kind of empty feeling. All week long I felt like I was supposed to be out on the water looking for gators. And social media didn’t really help things. I spent each night combing through all of the posts on the alligator page and feeling like I was missing out, even though in reality we’d already won. For everyone that did go hunting and posted pictures of gators, I give you a tip of the cap! I saw some really good ones killed this year and that’s part of what makes the sport so much fun.
Since there were no alligators to hunt on Labor Day weekend, and since I didn’t do a dove field this year, a trip to the beach was in store. A sunset at Perdido Key isn’t exactly the same as a Mississippi River sunset, but it runs a close second. The one extremely good thing about it is I smell a lot better at the end of the evening as opposed to when I’m hunting alligators. If you didn’t already know, an alligator is possibly the nastiest creature on the face of the Earth. The smell is horrible when they are alive and much much worse when they are dead. It’s been well over a week since I processed our alligators, and the smell is still so bad outside of our house that even dogs won’t come around. I really need a good north wind so my garage will stop smelling like death.
The water at Perdido couldn’t have been any better this weekend. It was crystal clear, the perfect temperature, and the waves were more of a gentle rock rather than beating you to death. It’s usually a pretty good place to getaway, but it’s been a while since I’ve seen the water that perfect. Wading out beyond the surf you could see the bottom even at depths over your head. Little fish zipped around and the crabs were so plentiful you could catch a mess of them with nothing more than a child’s small net. There was only one thing that was somewhat bothersome: jellyfish.
Now, I’m not afraid of jellyfish and they usually don’t bother me, but I do have a history with them. When my wife and I got married, we made the genius decision to go to Jamaica for several days following the wedding. And why not? We love the beach so what would be better than a honeymoon on a Caribbean island? And it was perfect timing. The United States was trying to extradite a drug lord and fighting broke out in Kingston that left about 75 people dead. There were men armed with machine guns at every stop light on the way to the resort in Ocho Rios, and our driver threatened every other driver on the road with a machete. To say I was a little uptight would be a severe understatement.
We arrived safely at the resort and there were plenty of activities for us to do, we just had to schedule them. The one thing I really wanted to do more than anything else was go snorkeling in the crystal clear water. So, we booked it. The next day we were on a glass bottom boat in the clearest water I’d ever seen. We hopped in and started to explore. I decided to leave the surface for a better look at what was below and that’s where the problem happened. I was chasing a little fish around when I swam through what seemed to be a cloud. The problem was this cloud was a cloud of jellyfish. Yall, I got stung so many times I don’t even know how I’m still alive. I should have at the very least turned into part-jellyfish. I got stung all over my body including somehow underneath my mask. It was like there was a million mini-tasers floating through the water. I can’t be certain, but I think I even swallowed a few jellyfish. When I got out of the water, I had red marks from head to toe. And the one thing that bothered me the most was I thought I was probably going to have to spend the night in a hospital in a foreign country.
In the end, I decided not to pursue medical care. If I died in our room that night then I just died in our room. I’m sure the doctors in Jamaica are somewhat qualified, but I was not going to test it to find out. Fortunately, I’m essentially Superman and my body handled the jellyfish venom with few complications outside of my blood pressure probably being elevated due to stress. Needless to say, that was my last time to snorkel on the trip.
So yeah, when I saw the jellyfish floating around this weekend it may have given me a little PTSD. And I was a little concerned when our kids started catching them and putting them in their bucket. But then I remembered that they have my blood running through their veins, so they are probably mostly immune to jellyfish stings.
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